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Two Sides Of Holiday Cheer From Kelly Clarkson, Nick Lowe

By Ken Tucker |
NPR

Kelly Clarkson's new holiday album is titled Wrapped in Red. Courtesy of the artist

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New collections of Christmas music come out every year, and several entries in 2013’s batch are already making an impact. Kelly Clarkson‘s Wrapped in Red made its debut at No. 3 on the Billboard Top 200, while Nick Lowe‘s new one, called Quality Street: A Seasonal Selection for All the Family, finds him mixing traditional songs with new ones he’s written or co-written with Ry Cooder.

Quality Street furthers the latter-day Nick Lowe style; the formerly bashing pop-rocker has for the past decade embraced more quiet music as a metaphor for maturity. That’s a dubious premise that he redeems with subtle intensity.

In contrast to Nick Lowe’s lo-fi album, Kelly Clarkson revs up her big voice to deliver some grand holiday cheer on Wrapped in Red. The title song is a Phil Spector-style ballad that Clarkson co-wrote.

For someone who graduated from the American Idol school of over-singing, Clarkson has become one of the most pleasurably controlled of pop singers. It also helps that she has an impish sense of humor. Thus, while her album is padded with a few not especially imaginative versions of chestnuts such as “White Christmas” and “Blue Christmas,” it also contains a jaunty, Motown-style new song, “Underneath the Tree.”

This year, the holiday releases include nothing so mind-cloudingly odd as Bob Dylan’s Christmas in the Heart from 2009 — although Duck the Halls, from the bearded reality-TV conglomerate in Duck Dynasty, has a certain rough, country-music charm. However, I prefer the contrasting philosophies of these two albums: Kelly Clarkson’s glossy but heartfelt work and Nick Lowe’s earnest yet playful production. Either one will put you in a holiday mood in the month before Christmas.